


The Things He Doesn't Say

by TimesBeingWhatTheyAre



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Gen, Season 17 Spoilers, h/c
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:33:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26201212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TimesBeingWhatTheyAre/pseuds/TimesBeingWhatTheyAre
Summary: “I waited and I waited and I waited for you, and you never came,”
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	The Things He Doesn't Say

Ziva says “I waited and I waited and I waited for you, and you never came,” and her brown eyes glow with tears, vulnerable as that Mossad agent he met all those years ago never would have dared to be.

He looks at her, and makes his excuses (and he knows them to be excuses, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t true). 

There’s a chasm between them now, one that was never there before, and all Gibbs can do is feel it growing wider and wider, yawning open as the ground beneath his feet becomes unsteady.

“If I’d gotten it into my head that you were alive, and then I went searching and you weren’t...I wouldn’t have…” he trails off, and Ziva looks at him, questioning and desperate.

He wonders if perhaps this is all in his head. It’s not like he hasn’t been seeing enough dead people recently. 

“I wouldn’t have…” he tries again, and the words get stuck in his throat, sticking like glue and no matter how much he swallows, he can’t get around that lump.

The words he doesn’t say are  _ survived _ . He looks at her and says goodbye, and doesn’t say that after her death, he sat in his basement with a glass of bourbon and rust, and looked at the heavy weight of his gun in his hand. He can’t say that even after Paraguay, even after he moved back into his own bed, even as Mike stared at him from one corner and Diane smirked in another, even then he wondered what it would feel like to finally have a bullet lodged in somewhere fatal.

His temple, maybe. If he were the one to do it.

His heart, perhaps. If he could jump in front of a bullet on the job.

Ziva walks away, and still she doesn’t hug him, and Gibbs pretends like he couldn’t care less because he’s never been one for physical affection.

He wonders if its some kind of sign that he really is messed up beyond redemption when he wishes for Diane to be there to snark at him and tell him how to fix this. He thinks he’d even take Mike, but the delusions aren’t around when he wants them to be (and Tobias is the only person who knows there’s something really not right and he’s just as dysfunctional to not realise that talking to a dead ex-wife is not healthy or sane).

Instead, he gets an empty cabin. He gets warm lights that reflect yellow off the old wooden surfaces, and a row of hooks without any scarves hanging. 

Gibbs feels his eyes burn again, and he swallows harshly, looking up to the ratty ceiling and blinking as though it’ll be enough to save him.

Unbidden, his conversation with Grace rises to the surface. “You’re barely hanging on,” and his half-admittance of his real fears. “I’m worried about what I’d do...without NCIS,”

He wonders if she thinks he’d be bored. If she thinks he meant that he would be purposeless. It’s not fair to Grace, though, all this guessing, because they both know the truth.

After all, he’s sat on a rock in the desert, gun held in steady hands, done it dozens of times, and NCIS has always been on the list of reasons why he doesn’t pull the trigger. Ziva has been on that list for years now, although after her supposed death it got a little more complex, but now?

He wonders if he’s just managed to lose another daughter, so soon after getting her back, and harshly dashes away the tear that dares to fall onto his cheek at the thought. He doesn’t deserve to run away from the consequences of his actions, his responsibilities, but…

He looks down at the gun in his holster, seeing the familiar way the light falls on it, and steps out of the door, pushing it closed behind him.

He’s still got a job to do.

For now.

  
  



End file.
